National Electronic Site Licence Initiative (NESLI)
Consortium of Swets & Zeitlinger and the University of Manchester
appointed Managing Agent.

The Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher Education Funding
Councils has appointed a consortium of Swets & Zeitlinger and Manchester
Computing at the University of Manchester as Managing Agent for the UK
National Electronic Site Licence Initiative (NESLI), subject to the
completion of formal contracts.

NESLI is an initiative to deliver a national electronic journal service
to the UK higher education and research community and is a successor
programme to the Pilot Site Licence Initiative (PSLI). The Managing
Agent will undertake negotiations with publishers, manage delivery of
the electronic material, and oversee the day-to-day operation of the
programme to ensure that it provides value for money through cost
effective operation.

The contract takes effect from May 1st 1998 and journal delivery will
commence from January 1999 for a three year period.
Swets & Zeitlinger is one of the leading global subscription agents
and the largest in Europe. It has a long tradition of providing
journal subscription services to academic libraries and institutions,
particularly in the UK where it acts as a supplier to a large number
of universities. It has close links with scholarly a research
publishers world-wide and has been one of the pioneering agents in the
development of gateway services for accessing and managing Internet
based full text journal collections. Further details can be found on
the web at http://www.swets.nl/ <http://www.swets.nl/>
Manchester Computing is part of the University of Manchester,
providing local computing services for the University and UMIST, and
specialist dataset services via MIDAS to the UK higher education
community. MIDAS is a JISC-designated national datacentre hosting more
than 40 strategic datasets including the UK Census, JSTOR, Beilstein
CrossFire, and satellite data. MC also hosts the COPAC (Consortium of
University Research Libraries OPAC) project and the eLib SuperJournal
Project. Further details can be found on the web at
http://www.midas.ac.uk/ <http://www.midas.ac.uk/>

The Consortium's NESLI Web site will be launched in late June and will
provide full information on the programme and services.
1 May 1998